To Kill a Mockingbird is 50 years old

[Thumper]

Hello all,

I have been going to the Barnes & Noble super bookstores in Indianapolis, here lately. I love those big ol' bookstores. Anyway, it was there that I saw the displays that To Kill a Mockingbird is 50 years old! I'm going to have to get it. I am crazy about that book. I was thinking about buying my neice Belle a copy. I don't know if its still being read in school or not.

[bookfan]

A great book. The celebrated writer Malcolm Gladwell has celebrated the anniversary with a piece in the New Yorker that says Atticus Finch isn't as heroic a character as people like to think: The Courthouse Ring.

A lot of people are now mad at Gladwell, some because he's a Canadian-born New Yorker making pronouncements about the culture of the South in an era before he was born.

[Cynique]

Very interesting article. Time is the great equalizer. Years sometimes have to pass before we can put things in their true perspective.

[bookfan]

Very interesting article. Time is the great equalizer. Years sometimes have to pass before we can put things in their true perspective.

Gladwell's ideas are not particularly original. Law professors have been writing revisionist takes on Atticus Finch for a while. See Steven Lubet's 1999 article, "Reconstructing Atticus Finch," and Monroe Freedman's 1992 comments in the same vein.

What I liked most about Gladwell's piece is how he points out that what Lee has Finch describe as a "blind spot" afflicting the leader of the lynch mob is actually a homicidal hatred of blacks.